City buys church property for greenway

Third Creek Baptist Church Pastor Dr. Rod Duncan talks about what the church will do with the money gained from selling a piece of land to the city of Knoxville.
Brianna Paciorka/News Sentinel

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The Knoxville City Council approved a $45,000 sale of this strip of land belonging to Third Creek Baptist Church, pictured in background. The land will be used to build a pedestrian bridge over Western Avenue, connecting a future greenway to Victor Ashe Park.(Photo11: BRIANNA PACIORKA/NEWS SENTINEL)Buy Photo

The offering plates could have been passed among the members of Third Creek Baptist Church for weeks before they totaled the $45,000 the church voted to accept from the city of Knoxville a couple of weeks ago.

In December the Knoxville City Council approved a purchase of property from the church, which is at the corner of Western Avenue and Sullivan Road. The land will help extend a greenway connecting the Weisgarber Greenway to the Victor Ashe Greenway by way of a pedestrian bridge over Western Avenue. The $6 million project needed space for the bridge and Third Creek had the space.

The strip of land, if you want to call it that, is to the right of the church looking from Western Avenue. The piece of land measures a couple hundred feet long and is littered with wooden spikes.

The land is on a steep part of the property that pastor Dr. Rod Duncan said would eventually have been a parking lot, if anything at all.

Duncan said the church, which just celebrated its 184th birthday and is one of the oldest churches in Knoxville, wasn’t looking to sell property, but he recognized the growing community could use the space for the greenway, which in turn could help the church.

“We want to do everything we can to grow the church for our community to help people here, but when the city needed help with the (pedestrian bridge) we did the best we could to cooperate to help with a growing area,” he said.

The fact that the city is doing business with a church isn’t new. Churches and faith-based groups lease space from the city regularly, city spokesman Eric Vreeland said. But it isn’t common that the city purchases land or in some way or another gives money to a church, he said.

This rare opportunity isn’t lost on Duncan. Third Creek intends on using the money to help with remodeling the building or saving it for fixing up the church in the future, he said. More than anything, the deal brings the church closer to the community it serves.

“We’re hoping when the project is finished, and it’ll probably be a few years, that we’ll be able to use that and be able to minister to some bicyclists and hikers and have them come stop by and come to our service with us and we’ll be able to use it as a tool for ministry,” he said.

“It will be right here, and we’ll have a lot of new opportunities to be able to do some ministry things and outreach,” Duncan continued.

Bridging greenways

The $6 million plans for connecting the Weisgarber Greenway to the Victor Ashe Greenway came from the city’s Greenway Corridor Feasibility and Assessment Study.

The connection, when complete, will link the Cedar Bluff neighborhood and the West Hills Neighborhood to the Pleasant Ridge Neighborhood, creating some 16.4 miles of connected greenways, according to plans for the project.

Aaron Browning, deputy director for the Parks and Recreation Department, said construction on the pedestrian bridge portion of the project could end in 2017, but he said projects like this often take longer than predicted.

Browning also said connecting the two greenways has been a conversation for some time and crossing Western Avenue was the “potential missing link” to the project.

The plans first called for a tunnel under Western Avenue, but flooding concerns nixed them, he said.

The construction of the project, including the pedestrian bridge, is being handled by the Tennessee Department of Transportation. TDOT spokesman Mark Nagi said the pedestrian bridge was determined to be the “most economical and feasible" for construction.

Portions of the plans to connect the Victor Ashe Greenway to the Weisgarber Greenway with a pedestrian bridge that will cross Western Avenue.(Photo11: Submitted)

A portion of a rendering of the pedestrian bridge that would help connect the Victor Ashe Greenway to the Weisgarber Greenway. The pedestrian bridge would go over Western Avenue.(Photo11: Tennessee Department of Transportation)